On this day: Bombs hit the Shetland Islands

In 1936, Edward VIII told prime minister Stanley Baldwin that he intended to marry American divorcée Mrs Wallis Simpson. Picture: Reuters

13 November

1093: King Malcolm III died at the Battle of Alnwick, during an invasion of Northumbria. Malcolm Canmore, husband of St Margaret, was the last of the Celtic kings of Scotland.

1553: Lady Jane Grey and others tried for treason in England.

1715: Battle of Sheriffmuir between the Jacobite army under the Earl of Mar and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of Argyll.

1851: Telegraph service between London and Paris opened.

1914: The brassiere was patented in the United States by Mary Phelps Jacob.

1916: Battle of the Somme ended at a cost of 60,000 Allied lives, having started on 1 July.

1936: Edward VIII told prime minister Stanley Baldwin he intended to marry twice-divorced American Mrs Wallis Simpson.

1939: Bombs hit the Shetland Islands, the first to drop on British soil in the Second World War.

1940: Walt Disney’s Fantasia opened in New York.

1942: United States troops held off Japanese at Guadalcanal.

1956: The United States Supreme Court declared invalid Alabama’s law segregating black people from whites on buses.

1964: Pope Paul VI said he would give his jewelled tiara to the world’s poor.

1973: State of emergency declared after overtime ban by Britain’s electricity and coal workers.

1977: Somalia, angered by Soviet support for Ethiopia in territorial war, ordered Soviet advisers to leave and ended Soviet use of naval facilities in Indian Ocean.

1987: The first criminal conviction based on genetic fingerprinting led to a rapist being sentenced at Bristol Crown Court to eight years’ imprisonment.

2001: The Afghanistan capital of Kabul fell to the American and British-backed Northern Alliance as troops of the ruling Taleban retreated towards Kandahar.

2001: The cost of the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood soared to above £240 million, six times the original estimate. (It eventually topped £400m.)

2004: MP Boris Johnson was dismissed as the Conservative Party vice-chairman and arts spokesman after accusations of lying about an affair.

2007: The First Minister and SNP leader, Alex Salmond, predicted the break-up of Britain by 2017 and said that Scotland would be independent within ten years.

BIRTHDAYS

Gerard Butler, Glasgow-born actor, 44; Right Reverend Lord Carey of Clifton, Archbishop of Canterbury 1991-2002, 78; Adrienne Corri, Scottish actress and author, 80; Bonnie Dobson, Canadian singer and songwriter, 73; Whoopi Goldberg, actress, 58; Joe Mantegna, American actor, 66; Chris Noth, American actor, 59; Terry Reid, British rock musician, 64; Alexandra Shulman OBE, editor of British Vogue, 56; Howard Wilkinson, English football administrator, 70; Steve Zahn, American actor, 46.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1761 Sir John Moore, Glasgow-born general and posthumous hero of the Battle of Corunna; 1785 Caroline Lamb, writer and Byron’s lover; 1850 Robert Louis Stevenson, author; 1912 Eugéne Ionesco, playwright and surrealist; 1964 Paul McBride QC, Scottish criminal lawyer.

Deaths: 1687 Nell Gwynne, orange seller, actress and mistress of King Charles II; 1868 Gioacchino Rossini, Italian composer; 1903 Camille Pissarro, painter; 1973 Elsa Schiaparelli, couturier; 1995 Robert Stephens, actor; 2005 Harry Gold, bandleader and saxophonist.